Archive for February 27th, 2018

25 February 2018 (openDemocracy)* — Just as Suu Kyi dismisses allegations of Myanmar’s international human rights crimes as designed to tarnish the image of Myanmar, the administration at Oxford University considers this a “public relations” issue.

When reality goes off the chart of what is thinkable, fiction is no match.

That Oxford University’s most iconic living graduate Aung San Suu Kyi may find herself at the International Criminal Court for her “complicity of silence in crimes against humanity” and even a genocide will go down in history as one such extraordinary tale.

February 24th—February 26, 2018— Our Standing with Rohingya Women delegation is well underway— the Nobel laureates are on the ground and with our partner, Bangladeshi women’s activist organization, Naripokkho, have visited and heard the stories of Rohingya women on the Bangladesh-Burma border firsthand.

One year after famine was declared in parts of South Sudan, three United Nations agencies on 26 February 2018 warned that without sustained humanitarian assistance and access, more than seven million people in the crisis-torn country– almost two-thirds of the population – could become severely food insecure in the coming months.

IOM/Bannon | Internally displaced persons (IDPs) line up early in the morning for a general food distribution at the UN Protection of Civilians Site, Malakal, South Sudan.

By Edward Curtin*

“The compulsive hatred of Putin by many who have almost zero idea about Putin or Russian history is disproportionate to any rational analysis, but not surprising. Trump and Putin are like weird doppelgangers in the liberal imagination.”
— John Steppling, “Trump, Putin, and Nikolas Cruz Walk into a Bar”

Edward Curtin

The Trump and Netanyahu governments have a problem: How to start a greatly expanded Middle-Eastern war without having a justifiable reason for one.

No doubt they are working hard to solve this urgent problem.

If they can’t find a “justification” (which they can’t), they will have to create one (which they will).

Syria’s war-battered east Ghouta, the troubled Kasais region in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Northern Rakhine state in Myanmar, where violence has sparked a major exodus of Muslim Rohingyas, were all in the spotlight as the Geneva-based Human Rights Council opened its session on 26 February 2018 , with UN officials warning that these situations spiraled into crisis “because not enough was done, early and collectively, to prevent the rising horrors.”

The Geneva-based United Nations’ Human Rights Council opened a regular session on Monday hearing calls to ensure that counter-terrorism efforts do not supersede international obligations to protect civilians and to end the harmful use of veto in the Security Council.

By Johan Galtung*

26 February 2018 – TRANSCEND Media Service —I am sitting somewhere in Afghanistan. Across the table are three Taliban; Pashtuns like most Taliban. My opening question is standard: “What does the Afghanistan look like where you would like to live?” with some equally standard follow-up questions: “What is the worst that happened to you?”, and “Was there a good period in the past?”

Johan Galtung

And they talk, and talk, and talk; it sounds like no Westerner ever asked them questions about what they think.

For them the answers were obvious, and they were very eager to explain the obvious:

The worst that happened to them was the (Sir Mortimer) Durand line in 1893, the 2,250 km border between Afghanistan and at the time the British Empire, today Pakistan, that cut the Pashtun and Baluchi nations in two.

Today the Pashtuns, 50 million, are the largest nation in the world without their own state, so their first priority is to undo that line defining them as smugglers, “terrorists” escaping to safety “on the other side”.

Eighty five per cent of Syrian refugee children in Jordan are living below the poverty line and a staggering 94 per cent of those under five in “multidimensional” poverty, meaning that they are deprived of some of the most basic needs such as education, health or protection, an assessment by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has revealed.

UNICEF/Lucy Lyon | Two Syrian refugees, a brother and sister, in Jordan. (file)

“Seven years into [the Syria] crisis, we need to collectively continue to do all that we can to support vulnerable refugee children and their families that are struggling to meet their basic needs,” Robert Jenkins, the head of UNICEF programmes in Jordan, on 26 February 2018 said in a news release.